A 1948 Mercury restomod is two cars wearing one body, and the first time I photographed this one I only did the outside of it. That set is the chrome grille and the last of the sun down a white fender, and it is here. This is the same car on the same Monday night in Richmond Hill, north of Toronto, most of it shot inside fifteen minutes of the first set, and this time I went and looked in the windows.
Fuzzy Dice and a Billet Wheel
The inside is where the money went. A chrome billet steering wheel on a tilt column, a row of round gauges set into a painted dash with the speedometer reading to 120, and a wide bench in red pleats that runs right across the car, red door panels, red everything. Then somebody hung a pair of red fuzzy dice off the mirror, two dollars worth of dice in front of a few thousand dollars worth of wheel, and that is the detail I kept coming back to. It tells you the car is for driving around in and being looked at, not for standing in front of a judge with a clipboard. I like that better.
I shot these through the open driver’s window from a couple of feet back, not up against the glass, so the plaza and the sun and a purple Challenger with its hood up all came into the frame off the door glass and the back window. You get the inside and the outside in one picture that way, if the light is on your side, and at half past seven in May it was.
What the Stickers Say
The back quarter window is the car’s passport. Frankenmuth AutoFest, Michigan, the fortieth one, and a second Frankenmuth sticker for 2024, a member sticker for the National Street Rod Association, a Georgetown cruise sticker, a Please Don’t Touch Me, and one that says Look Out, I Am a Hotrodder. Frankenmuth is a good four hours from here across the border past Sarnia, two and a half thousand cars every September, and this coupe has done that run at least twice! So it is not a trailer queen, it is a car that gets pointed at the 401 and driven, which is the whole argument for building a restomod in the first place, the old body on top and running gear underneath that will hold highway speed all day.
Why a 1948 Mercury Restomod Is the Odd One Out
Mercury sold 50,268 of these in 1948, changed almost nothing from the year before, new dial faces and that was about it, and then for 1949 threw the whole body away. The car that replaced it sat on a Lincoln body, sales went up by a quarter of a million, and within the year Sam Barris had chopped one into the first lead sled. Six years later James Dean drove a customised ’49 in Rebel Without a Cause and after that every kid in America wanted a ’49 Merc. Nobody made a film about a ’48.
So a 1948 Mercury restomod is the odd one out. It is the body that came one year too early to be famous, given the modern treatment its successor made famous, with the fenders and the running boards and the split windshield all left honest. Whoever built this one knew all that, or did not care, and I did not find out which.
Two Men and a Shadow
Two men were standing at the nose of it when I got there, one older with his hands in his jacket pockets and one with a beard and a ball cap, talking, not looking at the car. I assumed one of them owned it. I did not ask, which I regret now, because the stickers had given me three questions by the time I left. That is how it goes at these Monday nights though, you get the pictures or you get the conversation and I usually take the pictures.
The last frame has a man’s shadow thrown right across the hood and the door, long, with the sun almost on the ground behind me. I try to keep my own shadow out of a photograph and I am not certain this one is mine, there was a fellow standing at my shoulder, but it may well be. Either way I kept it. A parking lot at that hour is mostly shadows and the car had to live with them like everything else there.
All of this is the Leica Q3, 28mm, available light, f/8 and 1/250 with the ISO climbing from 160 to 800 across the fourteen minutes between the first frame and the last. That is how fast the light leaves a parking lot in May. The first set of this car, the grille and the body and the low sun on the outside of it, is here, and there are more of these Monday nights north of Toronto in my street photography projects.
Thanks for looking!
